Alexander von Humboldt Ceremony

Awards Ceremony of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorships 2018 on May 8th 2018 in Berlin

The awarding of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship by Wil van der Aalst took place on May 8 in Berlin. This year's ceremony was a special occasion, as the AvH Foundation is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the AvH professorship. The prize was awarded by the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Anja Karliczek.

Wil van der Aalst is one of the leading minds in computer science. What is special about his research is that he does not restrict himself to issues of pure data processing using software and algorithms but investigates concrete business processes, workflows and organisational structures. He acquired his international reputation, in particular, as the founder of the still young field of process mining, whereby the flow of activities and order of events which make up a work process are chronologically reconstructed and analysed using log data. At the same time, consideration is also given to the human actors who carry out the individual steps in the processes. In this way, complex procedures that involve several human actors can be studied, such as airport luggage handling, bank lending or insurance claims processing. Process mining can be used, for example, to ascertain whether the actual processes coincide with the envisaged process workflows or whether certain steps in a process are particularly time consuming or cost intensive. The open source tool ProM, co-developed by van der Aalst, has become a standard tool worldwide. At RWTH Aachen University, Alexander von Humboldt Professor Wil van der Aalst will bolster the cross-cutting field of process and workflow analysis and drive cooperation with the engineering, business and economics, and medicine faculties, and also industry.